The Gore Connoisseurs

Throughout Brandon Cronenberg 's arresting sophomore feature we're led to believe Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is having her identity worn away by inhabiting so many bodies - until we understand she never really had one to begin with. Warning: Spoilers How do we define our sense of self? At the beginning of the film, Vos is shown a box of items from her past by her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Girder is satisfied that Vos has been restored to her sense of self after inhabiting Holly's (Gabrielle Graham) body when she successfully recalls a memory for each object - particularly after she says she always felt guilty for killing a butterfly she wanted to have pressed, which seems to reveal something deeper about who she is. Next we see Vos pay a visit to her semi-estranged husband and son, rehearsing how to greet them on her way. At the time this seems to imply Vos still hasn't returned to her old self. When Vos becomes Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), it seems at ...

The second instalment of Mike Flanagan ’s The Haunting anthology series, The Haunting of Bly Manor, sees a markedly different take on ghosts than the earlier Haunting of Hill House . Bly Manor sets up an all-new mythology for its ghostly residents, which is all part of Flanagan’s aim to shake up the tone in the new series. While Hill House focussed on childhood trauma, Flanagan has described Bly Manor as a “Gothic romance” – which influences the way ghosts are portrayed in the series. Warning: Spoilers for  The Haunting of Bly Manor The origin of the haunting We’re never explicitly told why Hill House is so chock full of ghosts, other than the fact there is something fundamentally wrong about the building. Episode one opens with Steven Crain reading the first paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s novel in voiceover, explaining: “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within.” We come to learn that the house itself is carnivorous, claiming the soul...

While the scary tales Fred (Josh Ruben) and Fanny (Aya Cash) tell each other in Shudder 's Scare Me might seem disconnected from the main plot, their ideas actually tell us a lot about their characters and growing conflict. WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Scare Me Fanny Fanny's wildly successful debut novel Venus  looks to continue the zombie subgenre 's tradition of using the undead for political commentary. From the drug-addled abridged version we're treated to, we learn the zombie plague only affects women in the novel. Is the corpses return from the grave to menace women metaphorical for the dusty patriarchal values which seek to undermine Fanny's success? Fanny's first off-the-cuff story in the cabin centres on a young girl who attempts to kill her grandfather, but ends up killing his dog by accident and earning his ire from beyond the grave. At its heart it's a story of generational conflict - with a daughter trying to rid herself of her c...

It’s a common trope in horror – not only is your protagonist menaced by an otherworldly threat, their loved ones refuse to believe them. It’s a cliché that can sometimes become wearing, but new Shudder release Spiral is a rare example of it being used to further character development and thematic explorations. Warning: This article contains spoilers for Spiral Characters’ refusal to believe the protagonist is a narrative technique employed for a variety of reasons - to create conflict between characters, to isolate the protagonist, and to simply pad out the runtime before things come to a head in the third act. The trope is memorably used in Fright Night (1985) when no one believes horror nerd Charley’s (William Ragsdale) outlandish claim that his neighbour is a vampire. It also led to Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) getting bars put on her bedroom window when no one believes her about Freddy Krueger. Hereditary , The Invisible Man and The Wretched a...

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots live through a Stepford Wives- style suburban nightmare in surreal head-scratched Vivarium, which has just landed on Shudder . The movie questions gender roles and family ideals through the prism of reality-bending housing developments and mutant alien children . It’s very much open to interpretation, but here are five small details which could be more significant than you think. Warning: Spoilers ahead 1/ What’s a vivarium? According to the Oxford dictionary, a vivarium is "an enclosure, container, or structure adapted or prepared for keeping animals under semi-natural conditions for observation or study or as pets". It ties in with the movie’s uncanny aesthetics – the fluffy clouds, windless skies and picture book sunsets all seem ‘semi-natural’. The idea a vivarium is for observation or study also highlights the film’s role in picking apart the dream of the nuclear family. It’s no coincidence that one poster for the movie rif...

WARNING: SPOILERS. As well as being the first great horror movie filmed during the Covid-19 pandemic , Shudder's  Host is of the moment in more ways than one. Though the scary-as-hell found footage flick has a relatively by-the-numbers plot involving six friends accidentally summoning a demon, dig deeper and there are several intriguing ways it can be seen as an expression of very specific lockdown anxieties. 1/ The title has multiple meanings The host of a Zoom meeting. The unwitting host of a demonic presence. Yet it also could be the host of a virus like Covid-19. The idea of unwittingly inviting something threatening into our private space - as we see the characters do when they accidentally summon the demon - is very similar to our fear of bringing back the virus to our homes and harming our loved ones. 2/ Together yet alone What Host does better than fellow desktop found footage film Unfriended  is emphasise the simultaneous aloneness and togetherne...